[1]At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign the engineering department has a pretty cool toy. It’s a giant mechanical press that can apply up to 3 million pounds of pressure on a given object.

To show its strength at an open house, the engineers placed an 800-pound, 18-inches-wide concrete cylinder beneath the press and started applying the pressure. In the end, it only took roughly half of the machine’s strength, around 1.6 million pounds of force, to break the concrete. You won’t want to miss the fashion it does it in.

We have a feeling that if we had one of these around the office we wouldn’t get much work done.